The average consumer is exposed to over 5,000 marketing messages per day; however, only 16% of people trust advertisements from brands.

Instead, 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family over any other type of advertising which can be seen in the dramatic rise of influencer marketing and focus on establishing employee brand advocacy.

Employee Brand Advocacy is the method of creating brand advocates out of your employees by encouraging and training them to represent your brand on social media.

People don’t buy from businesses; they buy from people they trust. Social Media has become the ultimate tool for relationship and brand building, and employee’s personal brands are an extension for the corporate brand. On average, employee posts on social can generate 8x more engagement than when the same content is shared through a brand handle. Think about what that means for brand storytelling and hiring?

Building Employee Brand Advocacy starts with your culture.

• Culture: By instilling a social culture at your company, you encourage employees to tweet, share on LinkedIn, and post on Facebook to build relationships, spread your brand story, and build buzz.
• Social Training: While it’s unlikely that your employees have zero traces of social media, it is more common for Facebook to remain personal or someone has never created a Twitter account. That is where training can help. Start by creating a Quarterly Training Program where your social team can explain how to create a Twitter of how to post on LinkedIn. Throw in some pre-canned tweets and posts for everyone, and you’ll be surprised how your engagement can skyrocket.
• Corporate Blog: 50% of B2B website traffic is driven by blogs. By giving employees the opportunity to author blog posts, it not only showcases your company culture but also gives employees the opportunity to showcase their unique voice online.

Edited to include the example below.

Right now, I am in the process of building and scaling the social media for NetTracer (follow us on LinkedIn & Twitter!) Most days, I can send one tweet from my personal account that reaches more people than NetTracer does the entire month. I am a believer that as an employee of NetTracer, I am an extension of the brand and since I believe in what we do, I regularly use my social media in addition to NetTracer’s to spread our message.

For example, I sent the same tweet from my account and NetTracer’s about hiring a Senior Engineer. My personal tweet generated over 20x the engagement, impressions, and responses than NetTracer’s. Granted I have been tweeting for years versus NetTracer, but the initial sentiment is still true: People want to hear from people and the power of social is real.

By the way, we are still hiring for that Senior Engineer (Angular 2+ Developer) if you want to come and join a great team!